Reflections of a Demon
by Jainie Starr
Summary: Post-VG Brian reflects on the mistakes he's made.


Reflections of a Demon

BANG! 

I was dead. I was down; I was out. And, most importantly, I was free. 

It was my escape hatch - my way of finally putting a stop to all the insanity before the insanity could put a stop to me. I'd assassinated Maxwell Demon and I'd done it gladly. I was carted offstage on a gurney and secreted away and in my hotel room that night - covered with sticky, too-red stage blood - I laughed until I cried. It was finally, blessedly over. It was the kind of relief only terminally ill people who get well again can understand, for that's what the success had come to feel like to me: a terminal disease, a cancer, eating me away on the inside. 

It took just nanoseconds... and, like magic, I was a regular person again. But still, it was too late to save whatever I might have had with Curt... 

Nobody remembers me, now, and I suppose that's all for the best. Yes, I do believe it was the best thing that could have happened - it was the one thing I found myself wishing for most, at that point - to be free of it all. Without Curt, there _was_ no point to it - to _any_ of it - the touring, the albums, any of it. 

Something I thought it would kill me not to possess became something I _knew_ would kill me if I were to ever lose it... but I lost it anyway. I lost _him_ anyway. 

It's still not easy to talk about... the breakup. I haven't said the word "breakup" in so long - I haven't said his name in so long. It feels almost alien on my lips. That name that I'd spoken so often and with such love. What strange spells time can work on the human heart. 

It's so nice - to be able to walk down the street, now, and get those blank, unknowing looks. I'd forgotten how much I missed it - the anonymity, the blessing of being just another face in the crowd. Don't know what you've got till it's gone, as they say. You have no idea how much I appreciate the blank looks, not being recognized. 

Before, everyone knew who I was - wherever I walked, my shame and failure walked with me. They knew my face and were instantly reminded of all the millions of ways that I'd fucked up my life and hurt people... and hurt myself. Seeing the pity and/or disgust in their eyes made me wish that the bullet I'd taken that night - oh so many years ago, now - had been real. 

But now they look at me and they just see another face - they don't see my history... they don't see my fans turning on me, don't see Curt walking out on me, don't see me scuttling my own dying career and running for cover. And I'm glad for that. I truly am. It's a relief - a great, heavy weight off my shoulders - to be a nobody again. I never realized how good it felt to be a nobody, after I'd been a somebody for so long. 

Curt saw me that night of the Death of Glitter concert, I know he did. Of course, I didn't do a very good job with the incognito business... in those days, a man with blue hair began to stand out in a crowd again (my fans had all since bleached out the dye jobs they'd gotten to match mine or changed the color) - and a man with blue hair in a leather trench and wide-brimmed hat? Doubly obvious. So it's no wonder to me that he did see me. 

I didn't know whether to be pleased or hurt to see him there - he was performing at a concert which was celebrating the death of a music and style that I'd brought to life. Was he there merely out of spite? A last dig at the man who'd hurt him? Or was he there to purge the last of his own ... demons? 

It's become so difficult to tell - time has a penchant for blurring away the edges of memory - did I let him go or did he run away? Or did we let each other go? 

I got such a thrill out of confounding people. The music was important to me, always, but a malicious shock was the icing on my cake. In England, it was my music that shocked them - it was so very different from anything they'd ever heard before - but not-so-surprisingly, the kids liked it and rallied around me. In America, the shocker was not my music, but my _lifestyle_ - the fact that I was bisexual. Americans... they were so very painfully easy to shock. At times, were it not for the thunderstruck looks on their faces, it might not have even been worth the trouble. I'd be seen kissing another boy on TV and the Stateside grannies would topple over and wallow about on the floor with coronaries. 

I never took myself or my music as seriously as other people did, or as seriously as my fans did. My music was fun - it was youth and sex and clothes and beauty. How was I to know that I'd start a revolution? 

Curt hates me, I know. I don't blame him. I'd hate me, too, if I were him. 

I'd sacrificed so much to get where I was ... and I wasted it. Squandered the time that I had in the spotlight. I kick myself for it now, often. People don't realize the pain I went through in what seems to be only a blink of the eye, now. I never meant to hurt people - never meant to use them and toss them aside - but that's what I did. All because I thought it would help my career. 

Well, after all the time I've spent on the other side of fame (the quieter, safer side of anonymity), I think I can say with a clear conscience and a sense of complete surety that I was _wrong_. That the things to which I resorted to further my own career were so very wrong. I feel as if I should go back to all the people that I've hurt in my life - darling Cecil, Mandy, Curt - and beg their forgiveness on my hands and knees. But there are many things in life, things you can do and say to people, that you can't take back - and I'm afraid I've done and said them all. 

I still think about Curt - he was too big a part of my life to just forget him after five years, ten years, even twenty - I think about what might have happened if I'd done things differently. What path we would have ended up on if I'd made different choices. Would we still be together today? Would I still be singing? Would we be singing _together_? 

I did love him, you know. Well, as much as I could have loved _anybody_ at that age and considering the position in which I'd purposefully placed myself. I've cursed myself a million times over since that morning he left for not rushing down the stairs and chasing after him and begging him to stay as I now know I should have. I wanted so very much to be deserving of his love... 

When I looked at Curt, I saw someone that needed saving... but I failed to recognize the fact that even though he was strung out on methadone, I was strung out on a drug of my own - far more commonplace than heroin and a thousand times more addictive: ambition. Curt wasn't ambitious - he just loved the music... he _really_ loved the music. It meant more to him than it had ever meant to me. That's all there was for him, that's all he was in the business for - to make music. He didn't give a toss about the success or fame or whatever else might happen to tag along with it. 

He was the purest person I ever knew... I know you wouldn't think it to look at him - his exterior was ragged and worn, but underneath it all, he was new and clean and innocent - the Curt Wild very few people ever got to know. Curt never lied to me - he always told me exactly the way things were, whether I wanted to hear it or not. Whether I was there to listen or not. 

_He thought he fuckin'_ was _Maxwell Demon in the end, y'know? And Maxwell Demon, he thought he was god..._

Of all the things Curt could have said, that was the most painful - painful because it was the truth. Words spoken out of bitterness and hurt - the wounds from the break were new and still so very tender - I couldn't blame him for sounding bitter. I'd hurt him. 

I never could see myself the way others saw me, the way Curt saw me; I never saw anything particularly exceptional about myself. Standing side by side with Curt, chances were good that people would point to me and say that I was the beautiful one... oh, but if only they could have known how truly ugly I felt on the inside. If only they could have seen what Curt was like when he and I were alone. Curt was true beauty, to me... 

It all sounds so cliche, doesn't it? Pretty, but deeply insecure boy becomes rockstar to make up for low self-esteem and feelings of inadequacy - no, it's far from being a new story. 

All I've got left now, it seems, are if only's, what could have been's and a handful of faded photographs from our brief time together. I was never the camera-shy type, but Curt hated being photographed with a purple passion. He told me once that it made him feel like a tourist attraction. Curt never considered himself a star - whyever would anyone want to take a picture of _him_? At least, that was his way of thinking. He once said to me, "I'm nobody special... never have been, never will be." 

How very wrong he was. 

I remember ... that day on the beach when I gave him Oscar Wilde's pin... I held on to him so tightly, I swore to myself I'd die before I'd ever let him go... 

But I _did_ die... and he left... and I died again because of it.... 

The End. 


End file.
